People of the Revolution and the USSR

Communist Party of China Chinese communism 1904–1974 ○ Died

Leader of the "28 Bolsheviks" and Mao Zedong's foremost political rival

During the 1932 Shanghai Incident, Wang declared China faced "a struggle between two nations — the newborn Chinese Soviet Republic and the rotten Republic of China," calling this confrontation "the core of the total of the current Chinese political life."

The leading figure of the "28 Bolsheviks" trained at Moscow's Sun Yat-sen University, he imported a Comintern-loyal dogmatic line and led the early CCP's Moscow-aligned leadership. He was Mao Zedong's strongest rival, targeted in Mao's essays "On Practice" and "On Contradiction" and purged in the 1942 Rectification Movement as the symbol of dogmatism.

Communist Party of China Chinese communism 1904–1986 ○ Natural causes

From Miss Sophia’s Diary to The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River, a writer who lived through Yan’an and the anti-rightist purge

Born in Linli, Hunan on 12 October 1904, she made her name with Miss Sophia’s Diary in 1928, was expelled from the party in 1958 during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and died in Beijing on 4 March 1986.

From Hunan, she made her name in 1928 with Miss Sophia’s Diary, a portrait of the modern woman’s inner life, and joined the party after the Nationalists executed her husband Hu Yepin in 1931. She reached the Red Army area in northern Shaanxi in 1936 and was welcomed by Mao, but her 1942 essay “Thoughts on March 8” on sexism at Yan’an drew criticism in the rectification movement. Her land-reform novel The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River won a Stalin Prize in 1951; in the 1957 anti-rightist campaign she was labelled a rightist and spent more than twenty years labouring on a farm in the Great Northern Wilderness. She was rehabilitated in 1979.

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 1904–1989 ↓ Removed 1970 · natural causes

Mao’s political secretary and the codifier of “Mao Zedong Thought”, head of the Cultural Revolution Group until his fall in 1970

“The Cultural Revolution was a mad age, and I was a madman then,” Chen Boda said in 1988, after his release. “My life has been a tragedy; let people draw lessons from it.”

From Fujian, he studied at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow and from 1937 served at Yan’an as Mao’s political secretary, editing Mao’s writings and establishing the term “Mao Zedong Thought”. After 1949 he edited Red Flag and led propaganda work, supplying the theory of the Great Leap, and in 1966 headed the Central Cultural Revolution Group. At the 1970 Lushan plenum he sided with Lin Biao over the state chairmanship, provoked Mao’s anger and fell; in the 1981 trial of the “Lin Biao and Jiang Qing counter-revolutionary cliques” he received eighteen years. He died in 1989.

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 1904–1997 ○ Natural causes

The paramount leader who redirected China through reform and opening

The turn after 1978 reopened the question of the relationship between planning and socialism.

A Chinese Communist leader shaped by revolutionary work in France and Moscow, he returned after two purges during the Cultural Revolution and led economic reform and opening from 1978.

Communist Party of China Chinese communism 1905–1938 ✕ Executed

Internationalist socialist who fought across the Korean independence movement and the Chinese Revolution, subject of Song of Arirang

"Even in death, I want to see Korea's independence and the victory of the socialism I have believed in all my life." — to Nym Wales in Yan'an, 1937

Kim San was an internationalist socialist who fought across the Korean independence movement and the Chinese Revolution. He left twenty-two interviews with American journalist Nym Wales in Yan'an that became Song of Arirang (1941), a first-person account of that struggle; in 1938 he was executed on false spy charges and rehabilitated by the CCP in 1983.

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 1905–1954 ✕ Suicide under house arrest

The second-most powerful man in the CCP who wielded virtually autonomous power in Manchuria, then walked into Mao's trap and fell

'This medal should go to old pockmarked Gao Gang': Peng Dehuai, receiving the DPRK's highest award in Pyongyang, July 1953, crediting Gao's logistics and rear-base work

A CCP leader who rose from Shaanxi guerrilla bases to become the party, state and military boss of Manchuria (Dongbei), the PRC's most industrialized region, and a vice-chairman of the Central People's Government in 1949. During the Korean War, as commander and commissar of the Northeast Military Region, he organized the entire rear base and logistical network for the Chinese People's Volunteer Army; Peng Dehuai later said the medal he received 'should have gone to old pockmarked Gao Gang' for his home-front work. Summoned to Beijing in 1952 as chairman of the State Planning Commission to lead the First Five-Year Plan, he attempted to displace Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai from the Party hierarchy, a power play that Mao first encouraged then turned into the Gao-Rao Anti-Party Alliance purge. Placed under house arrest, he killed himself with sleeping pills in August 1954.

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 1905–1995 ○ Natural causes

CCP elder who designed China's socialist economic system with his 'bird-cage economy' concept

'The cage is the plan, and within it the bird [the economy] is free to fly as it wishes.' — 1982, formalizing his core vision of the market-plan relationship

A core figure in both the first and second generations of CCP leadership, Chen Yun was the architect of China's socialist economic construction. Starting as a typesetter at the Shanghai Commercial Press, he immersed himself in the labor movement, and through the Long March and the Yan'an Rectification Movement became Mao Zedong's trusted advisor as head of the CCP Organization Department. After 1949, as chairman of the Central Finance and Economic Commission, he drafted the First Five-Year Plan, stabilized prices, and, following the collapse of the Great Leap Forward, led economic reconstruction alongside Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. In the 1980s he formalized the 'bird-cage economy' (the market must fly freely within the cage of the plan) and became the second-most powerful figure in China after Deng, a gravitational center for Party conservatives moderating the pace of reform.

Communist Party of China Chinese communism 1906–1947 ✕ Executed

The writer whose “Wild Lilies” criticised privilege at Yan’an and made him the rectification movement’s first victim

A Party member who in 1942 attacked Yan’an’s privileges in “Wild Lilies”, he was expelled, imprisoned and secretly executed in 1947; Dai Qing called his case the movement’s key measure of repression.

A translator and writer from Henan, he went to Yan’an in 1937 and translated Marxist classics. In March 1942 his essay “Wild Lilies” in Liberation Daily pointed to graded rations and clothing for cadres and to the disillusionment of the young; in the rectification movement he was branded a “Trotskyist” and became the target of mass criticism meetings. Arrested in 1943, he was executed at Xing County, Shanxi, in 1947 during the retreat from Yan’an before the Nationalist offensive. In 1991 the Ministry of Public Security formally withdrew the Trotskyist charge.

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 1906–1978 ↓ Removed 1965 · natural causes

First minister of public security and chief of the general staff, purged on the eve of the Cultural Revolution as Lin Biao’s target

Mao trusted him as his closest security chief, saying "if the sky falls, Luo the Tall will prop it up." First minister of public security from 1949, he built the police apparatus for a decade, then led the general staff until his purge in late 1965.

From Sichuan and Whampoa’s sixth class, he served in Red Army political and security work and ran the Anti-Japanese Military and Political University. As first minister of public security from 1949 he built the police system and the campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries, and after Peng Dehuai’s fall in 1959 he managed the army as chief of the general staff. Putting training before politics, he was denounced by Lin Biao at the end of 1965 for plotting to seize military power, fell, and injured his legs in a suicide attempt in 1966. Rehabilitated in 1977 as secretary-general of the Military Commission, he died after surgery in West Germany the next year.

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 1906–1985 ○ Natural causes

Shaolin-trained Red Army general who led the Guangzhou military region on the eastern front of the 1979 war with Vietnam

In the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, Xu Shiyou commanded Chinese forces as head of the Guangzhou Military Region. Under his command, they advanced on the eastern front toward Cao Bằng and Lạng Sơn in northern Vietnam.

From Xinxian in Henan, he studied martial arts at the Shaolin Temple for eight years and took a name meaning “friend of Buddhism”. Joining the Red Army, he fought the war against Japan and the civil war and long commanded the Nanjing military region. Moved to the Guangzhou region in 1974, he and political commissar Wei Guoqing protected Deng Xiaoping when the Gang of Four purged him after Zhou Enlai’s death in 1976. In the 1979 war with Vietnam he led the Chinese forces and commanded the eastern front towards Cao Bằng and Lạng Sơn. A Politburo member from 1969 to 1982, he died in Nanjing in 1985.

Communist Party of China Chinese communism 1907–1946 ✕ Killed in crash

The CCP's young General Secretary who represented the Comintern line and later built the Party's press apparatus

During the Rectification Movement, he confessed: "I caused such great damage to the Party — no matter how hard I work, I can never make up for this loss." He added: "I am the person most responsible for all the disastrous consequences — here there is no 'one of.'"

General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (1931–1935), Bo Gu led the Party through the Jiangxi Soviet period and the early Long March. A member of the '28 Bolsheviks' trained at Moscow's Sun Yat-sen University, he represented the Comintern's left line alongside Wang Ming. After being ousted by Mao Zedong at the Zunyi Conference, he served as head of the Organization Department, director of Xinhua News Agency, and editor-in-chief of Liberation Daily, laying the institutional foundations of the CCP's press and propaganda apparatus. He died in a plane crash in 1946 while returning to Yan'an from the Chongqing negotiations.

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 1907–1971 ✕ Killed in crash

Mao's designated successor and the military genius who won the Chinese Civil War, third among the Ten Marshals

Told that the public saw him as 'Mao's best student,' Lin Biao was pleased and said: 'I don't have any talent. What I know, I learned from Chairman Mao.'

Lin Biao was one of the Chinese Communist Party's most brilliant military commanders, who led the Liaoshen and Pingjin campaigns in Manchuria to annihilate the Kuomintang's main forces and marched the People's Liberation Army into Beijing. Ranked third among the Ten Marshals in 1955, he became Minister of National Defense and spearheaded Mao Zedong's personality cult while vigorously advancing the Cultural Revolution. In 1966 he was made the Party's sole Vice Chairman and Mao's designated successor, reaching the apex of power before falling out with Mao in the early 1970s. After a failed coup attempt, he died in a plane crash over Mongolia on 13 September 1971 while fleeing toward the Soviet Union.

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 1908–2007 ○ Natural causes

First finance minister and central figure of the “61 renegades” case, who returned in the reform era as a conservative elder

Peng Dehuai and Zuo Quan named the operation the Hundred Regiments Offensive on 26 August 1940, but its launching was later revived as a charge against Peng in his line dispute with Mao.

From Shanxi, he was one of the 61 men who on party orders signed “recantations” to leave a Kuomintang prison in 1936, an episode revived in the Cultural Revolution as the “61 renegades” case that kept him confined for twelve years. As the first finance minister after 1949 he unified taxation and currency and was criticised by Mao in the 1953 “new tax system” affair. Returning in 1979 as vice-premier and vice-chairman of the Central Advisory Commission, he was one of the “eight elders” and chaired the meeting that removed Hu Yaobang in 1987. He died in 2007 at 98; Bo Xilai is his son.

Communist Party of China Chinese communism 1909–1969 ○ Died in prison

Ming historian and Beijing vice-mayor whose play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office became the fuse of the Cultural Revolution

A Chinese historian of the Ming dynasty who served as vice-mayor of Beijing after 1949. In November 1965 he fell from power when his play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office was attacked as an anti-Mao allegory; the fallout also purged Beijing mayor Peng Zhen. He died in prison in 1969.

A Ming historian from Zhejiang and a student of Hu Shih, he was active in the Democratic League in the 1940s and after 1949 served as vice-mayor of Beijing for culture and education. His 1961 play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, written at Mao’s own suggestion, told of an upright official dismissed by the emperor; in November 1965 Yao Wenyuan’s attack on it as a “poisonous weed” defending Peng Dehuai was the opening shot of the Cultural Revolution. Arrested in 1966, he died in prison in 1969; his wife and daughter also died in the persecution. He was rehabilitated in 1979.

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 1909–1992 ○ Natural causes

The finance chief who survived the Cultural Revolution, helped arrest the Gang of Four and became president; one of the “eight elders”

An orthodox, Soviet-style communist and firm believer in central planning, he blocked marketization and enthusiastically advocated military suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

A carpenter from Hubei, he was a political commissar of the Fourth Front Army and survived the destruction of the Western Route Army. He founded the New Fourth Army’s Fifth Division in Hubei during the war with Japan and led the breakout from the Central Plains at the start of the civil war. Finance minister for twenty-two years from 1954, he ran the economy and survived the Cultural Revolution at Zhou Enlai’s side. He joined the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976 and, between Hua Guofeng’s “two whatevers” and Deng Xiaoping, argued with Chen Yun for the primacy of planning. President from 1983 to 1988, he backed the crackdown of 1989.

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 1910–1980 ○ Natural causes

A field commander who read the course of war

He left for the north after telling his wife, “A general may well die on the battlefield.”

Deng Hua was a People’s Liberation Army general who commanded large formations through the Communist revolution and the Chinese Civil War. In 1950 he organized and trained the Northeast Border Defense Army, preparing the force that would cross the Yalu, then supported the Korean War as Peng Dehuai’s first deputy commander. From 1952 he led the Chinese People’s Volunteers through major operations and the armistice phase. Implicated in Peng Dehuai’s downfall, he was dismissed, persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, and rehabilitated in 1980.

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 1911–1994 ○ Natural causes

General who fought in Korea, commanded the Kunming region on the western front in 1979 and became chief of the General Staff

Appointed Kunming Military Region commander in January 1979, he directed the Yunnan front in the war with Vietnam. The following year he became PLA chief of the General Staff.

Born in Liling, Hunan, he joined the Red Army in 1928 and fought against Japan, in the civil war and in Korea. After commanding the Jinan and Wuhan military regions he took over the Kunming region in January 1979 and commanded the western front in the northwest in the war with Vietnam, while Xu Shiyou led the east. He became chief of the PLA General Staff in 1980 and died in Beijing in 1994.

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 1913–2002 ↓ Removed 1962 · natural causes

A founder of the northern Shaanxi base, purged for sixteen years, who opened Guangdong’s special economic zones

He built the Shaanxi–Gansu base with Liu Zhidan that became the Long March's destination, was purged in 1962 and confined for sixteen years, then opened the special economic zones as Guangdong's first secretary in 1978.

From Shaanxi, he founded the Shaanxi–Gansu base with Liu Zhidan, the destination of the Long March. After 1949 he headed the Northwest Bureau and served as State Council secretary-general and vice-premier, but in 1962 Kang Sheng denounced the novel Liu Zhidan as an “anti-party” defence of Gao Gang and Xi was purged, spending sixteen years in confinement and rural exile. Returning as Guangdong first secretary in 1978, he asked the centre for the power to “take one step ahead” to stem the flight to Hong Kong, which led to the Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shantou special economic zones in 1980. A Secretariat member in the 1980s, he supported Hu Yaobang and opposed his removal in 1987. He was Xi Jinping’s father.

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 1914–1991 ✕ Suicide

From the Shanghai stage to the pinnacle of the Cultural Revolution: Mao's wife who led the Gang of Four and remade Chinese revolutionary art

At her 1980 trial, Jiang Qing defied the court: 'I was Chairman Mao's dog — I bit whomever he asked me to bite.' Dragged from the courtroom, she shouted revolutionary slogans.

A central leader of China's Cultural Revolution and head of the Gang of Four, Jiang Qing was, as Mao Zedong's wife, the most powerful woman in the Chinese Communist Party. After working as a left-wing stage and film actress in 1930s Shanghai, she went to Yan'an in 1937 and married Mao; barred from politics for twenty years, she returned to the public stage in 1963 through a campaign to revolutionize Peking opera. Appointed deputy director of the Central Cultural Revolution Group in 1966, she opened the Cultural Revolution with the attack on the play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, established eight revolutionary model operas (yangbanxi), and was elected to the Politburo in 1969. Arrested in October 1976 after Mao's death, she was sentenced to death for 'counter-revolutionary crimes,' saw her sentence commuted, and died by suicide in a Beijing hospital in May 1991.

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 1915–1986 ↓ Left office 1980 · lung cancer

The peasant leader of the model village behind “In agriculture, learn from Dazhai”, who rose to vice-premier

The symbol of Mao-era self-reliance: after Mao's 1964 “In agriculture, learn from Dazhai” his brigade became the national model, and he rose to the Politburo and vice-premiership before the reforms sidelined him in 1980.

A barely literate peasant from Dazhai in Xiyang County, Shanxi, he terraced hillsides as brigade secretary and rebuilt the village after the 1963 floods without state aid. When Mao said in 1964 “In agriculture, learn from Dazhai” the village became the national model, and Chen became a Central Committee member in 1969, a Politburo member in 1973 and vice-premier for agriculture in 1975. The Dazhai model preached collective labour and self-reliance, but inflated statistics and coercion came to light; after the reforms began he left the vice-premiership in 1980, lived on a farm outside Beijing and died of lung cancer.

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 1915–1989 ↓ Removed 1987 · heart attack

The reformist general secretary who rehabilitated the Cultural Revolution’s victims and freed thought; his death sparked the 1989 protests

He died on 15 April 1989, days after a heart attack; a day later unofficial mourners demanded the state reassess him, and within a week about 100,000 students marched on Tiananmen Square.

From Hunan, he joined the Red Army at fourteen, marched on the Long March and led the Communist Youth League after 1949. Persecuted in the Cultural Revolution, as head of the Organisation Department from 1977 he reviewed and reversed millions of unjust cases and in 1978 organised the “criterion of truth” debate that underpinned Deng Xiaoping’s return. Party chairman in 1981 and general secretary from 1982, he drove reform and opening, but after the student protests of late 1986 he was forced to resign in January 1987 for laxity toward “bourgeois liberalisation”. He died of a heart attack on 15 April 1989, and the mourning gatherings grew into the Tiananmen protests.

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 1916–2015 ○ Natural causes

“If you want rice, look for Wan Li” — the reform pioneer who let Anhui’s peasants contract land to households

“If you want to eat rice, look for Wan Li”: the reformist leader who first implemented the household-responsibility system in Anhui, then served as First Vice Premier (1983–1988) and NPC Standing Committee Chairman (1988–1993).

From Shandong, he was vice-mayor of Beijing after 1949, directing the “ten great buildings” including the Great Hall of the People, and was persecuted in the Cultural Revolution. Appointed Anhui first secretary in 1977, he tolerated the secret land division at Xiaogang village and with the provincial “six articles” allowed household contracting in the famine-stricken countryside, the starting point of rural reform. As vice-premier for agriculture from 1980 he dismantled the people’s communes, and he chaired the National People’s Congress Standing Committee from 1988 to 1993. Returning from abroad in May 1989, he endorsed martial law. He died in 2015 at 99.

People’s Republic of China state institutions Chinese communism 1916–2015 ↓ Left office 1980 · natural causes

Mao’s bodyguard chief whose Zhongnanhai Unit 8341 arrested the Gang of Four, then pushed aside for the “two whatevers”

"A loyal soldier of Chairman Mao to the end": he guarded Mao for decades and had Unit 8341 arrest the Gang of Four in 1976.

From Jiangxi, he guarded Mao after the Long March and from 1949 headed the Central Guard Bureau (Unit 8341), managing the leadership’s security and daily life. Director of the General Office during the Cultural Revolution and trusted by Mao, in October 1976 he used Unit 8341 with Ye Jianying and Hua Guofeng to arrest Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four. Made party vice-chairman in 1977, he backed Hua’s “two whatevers” against Deng Xiaoping, resigned the vice-chairmanship in 1980 and left politics. He died in 2015 at 99.